Advice for interacting with busy people

I think there is a bit of a problem with the "favor" mindset and too much of the onus is put on the person seeking help.

People with power, money, connections, and influence, to the extent that they are EA, should use these capabilities for good, and often this can be through helping other EAs (or people, for that matter). Such big people are extremely busy, but this probably means that they should have systems in place to help them deploy their capabilities to effective uses. If this means hiring someone or referring someone else to screen requests, this might be necessary.

If Big EAs are not responsible with the use of their capabilities on behalf of other EAs, we will probably only reach a fraction of our capacity for doing good.

You say "The intended message of this post is not 'Don't reach out to busy people!', but 'Do reach out, and have these things in mind to make it more likely to get a response/if you don't get one,'" but then your first example is:

"Let's assume world-leading AGI alignment researcher Paul Christiano has put extensive research into finding the optimal soap dispenser... I still shouldn't ask him which soap dispenser to buy... And, I hope that Christiano thinks the same and would never talk to me again if I were to make such a request."

Even putting aside that these points are at odds with each other, EA really—and I cannot emphasize this enough—needs to cut the hero worship that posts like this reinforce. Successful people would not be where they are if people around them hadn't put thousands of hours into parenting, supporting, and mentoring them. It would be dumb to waste literally anyone's afternoons on "a soap dispenser shopping tour," but also, ~no one successful would ever agree to do this, and ~no one would ever ask. It's not a real example. The more realistic example is probably something like: a computer science PhD student at a top university is on the fence about reaching out to ask for a 30-minute Zoom because they don't want to waste Christiano's time.

My sense is that people strongly err on the side of not reaching out to people they should reach out to because they're intimidated, or think they're too unimportant, or are worried about wasting others' time. This is actually quite bad, because there are probably a dozen smart, hardworking people who are under-mentored for each person who is over-mentored. Most of these people are not going to realize their full potential, and that threatens the survival of humanity.

As you ultimately note, people who are busy and important are typically quite good at managing their own time. (I once co-authored with another graduate student a formal, three-paragraph email proposing a research project to a famous professor and got the iconic response: "Zthanks but I don’t have time. There are others who could do it." Our email probably took 1.5 hours to write and edit; he probably took 15 seconds to respond.) Busy people can make their own decisions about how to allocate their time.

I once made a related mistake:

At uni, I needed to to interact with my supervisor multiple times. They were very busy. I had to discuss a problem with them, that would take, say, 15 minutes of their time, but also their attention. But 15 minutes was way too much to ask! So I shortened to 1 minute, and this one 1 minute conversation did not solve the problem. I was still stuck and had to return with a very similar question later. In the end, I took more of their time, rather than less.

I would have wasted much less of their time if I had literally said to them: "I have a problem. Could we sit down for 15 minutes to discuss? Do you have a moment that works for you? It doesn't need to be soon."

Guess how much of my own time this would have saved...

A point I'd add, or perhaps a variation of point 2, is: 

Provide the necessary context: introduce yourself in a way that lets them know enough to get an idea of who you are in relation to them, explain the reason for your message concisely and be explicit with what action is required so that they can target the best response. 

It's better to write an additional paragraph in order to provide context, than to send a series of concise questions you need answers to without letting them know why they should care about replying in the first place.

Side note: I've read the post on pocket first, and it simply omitted section 7 without any hint of its existence. Wonder if that happens more frequently.

As for the post itself, I do agree with most of it. I think though that it (particularly point 1) has some risk of reinforcing some people's perception of reaching out to well known people as a potential status violation, which I think is already quite common in EA (although I know of some people who would disagree with me on this). I would guess most people already have a tendency to "not waste important people's time" (whatever "important" means to them) and rather err on the side of avoiding these people and e.g. not ask for a 1-1 at a conference even though they might benefit greatly from it. To make it short, I agree quite strongly with your point 7, but not so much with (the general vibe of) point 1.

An underrated solution here is for the busy person to simply charge for their time. Some professionals already do this - my coworker recently paid a few hundred dollars for an hour of time from someone who built a successful social media app.
It can be as easy as turning on the Stripe integration on your Calendly.